LibriVox recording of The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan, by Winston Churchill. Read by Mark F. Smith.

When the self-proclaimed Mahdi (“Guided One”) gathered Islamic forces and kicked the Anglo-Egyptians out of the Sudan, he unleashed a backlash. With the image of the heroic General Charles Gordon dying at Khartoum, the British public was ready to support a war to reclaim the lost territories. And when the political time was right, a British-Egyptian-Sudanese expedition led by the redoubtable Herbert Kitchener set out to do just that.

The river involved was the Nile. For millennia, its annual flood has made habitable a slender strip, though hundreds of miles of deserts, between its tributaries and its delta. Through this desolate region, man and beast struggled to supply the bare essentials of life. Though this same region, the expedition had to find and defeat an enemy several times larger than itself.

The young Churchill was hot to gain war experience to aid his career, and so he wangled a transfer to the 21st Lancers and participated in the last successful cavalry charge the world ever saw, in the climactic battle of Omdurman. He also had a position as war correspondent for the Morning Post, and on his return to England he used his notes to compose this book.

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M4B audiobook of complete book


This audio is part of the collection: The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection
It also belongs to collections: Audio Books & Poetry; Community Audio

Artist/Composer: Winston Churchill
Date: 2010-03-28
Source: Librivox recording of a public-domain text
Keywords: librivox; war; churchill; sudan; africa;

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: X-ray John - - May 28, 2012
Subject: Very good book about a subject only touched on by a movie
I really appreciated this book. A map is a good idea.
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I then saved it as a .jpeg

Reviewer: Sorker - - April 1, 2010
Subject: Good Story Good Reading
It's a great story of the attitude and willingness of a colonial power just 110 years ago. Churchill, being his John Bull best to be a nationalist and racist. So interesting to have him predicting that the UK and France will control all of Africa. This servces as a good grounding in the nationalistic, militaristic thinking that brought on WW1 and WW2,
The reader keeps a good, even pace and his elocution seems good and appropriate to the material. If you intend to follow closely, have your maps out.